Partially Buried

Partially Buried explores a web of genealogical traces. In this work the artist probes the notion of sites of memory as well as site-specific work by focusing on the location of Kent, Ohio. Partially Buried references the year 1970 during which the artist Robert Smithson produced his site-specific work, Partially Buried Woodshed at Kent State University. By chance the mother of the child in the video was present also in Kent State in May of that year, studying experimental music. In May of 1970, four students were shot while attending a rally protesting the U.S. invasion of Cambodia. “May 4, 1970” was painted on the Partially Buried Woodshed shortly afterward and the artwork took on another meaning.

After having lived and worked away from the country in which she was born for many years, Green asks in her film the questions: “How does one return? To a country, to a place of birth? To a location which reeks of remembered sensations? Is it possible to trace how they are triggered and why they are accompanied with as much dread as anticipation?”

She also focuses on a time during which she was a child: 1970, in particular, and more generally the 1970s, as perceived from the vantage point of 1996. How do we reinterpret the past? What do we choose to remember or discard? What is inescapable?